America is already losing the new cold war with China

The conflict is inevitable — and morally necessary — but are we even capable of fighting it?

Xi Jinping.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock)

The relevant question about the prospect of a new Cold War between the United States and China is not whether it is likely to happen but whether the U.S. has both the internal cohesion and the diplomatic acumen to wage it successfully. Defeating the genocidal tyrants in Beijing will require our politicians to have the same shared commitments and assumptions that made it possible for us to pursue an essentially unchanging containment strategy against the Soviet Union for four and a half decades, despite changes in administration and a cultural revolution in the 1960s.

There are good reasons to be pessimistic. In the United States it is impossible for a president to consider even the most basic steps in the direction of remaking our trade relations with an adversary that destroyed our industrial capacity amid almost zero resistance — the honorable stands made in the 1990s by organized labor and Pat Buchanan will be footnotes in the history of our decline. The Band-Aid measures proposed by President Trump, which represent about one percent of what will have to happen if the U.S. is to recover its textile, pharmaceutical, and heavy manufacturing capabilities, were widely dismissed as a "trade war" by China Respecter Man. Even if we assume, on the basis of no evidence, that the American people are theoretically willing to alter their consumption habits such that an unlimited supply of Chinese plastic junk is no longer essential to their daily lives, we would still face a journalistic, academic, professional, cultural, and political elite who will serve Beijing's interests.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.